• Question: Is magic real?

    Asked by anon-267480 on 5 Nov 2020.
    • Photo: Zsolt Keszthelyi

      Zsolt Keszthelyi answered on 5 Nov 2020:

      It depends. What do you consider to be magic?

    • Photo: Sam Geen

      Sam Geen answered on 5 Nov 2020:

      The author Arthur C Clarke said: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” – so if you showed an iPad to a medieval person they would think it was magic. Science doesn’t make things not magic any more – it shows you how strange and wonderful the universe is. You can do simple magic tricks like make a frog levitate with magnets, or bigger things like fly to the moon and cure illnesses.

    • Photo: Patrick Dalton

      Patrick Dalton answered on 6 Nov 2020:

      Sam had an excellent answer but I’d like to talk a little more about it.
      As Sam said, anything too advanced for a people to understand is magic to them, but there’s another aspect to it too. We’ve been conditioned by the stories we read to understand magic as something quite specific, to the point where it is almost cultural. The concept of following a set method (like a spell) to create something fantastical and unbelievable is something we’ve all heard in fiction books before, but in reality, a lot of the real life science we do today could fall under that category and be considered “magical” in nature. Under the right conditions, we can control and study some of the most awe-inspiring phenomena of our universe. I think to every scientist their work is “magical” in nature; because its the awe of what we can observe, understand and control that drives us to discover more.

    • Photo: Daisy Shearer

      Daisy Shearer answered on 7 Nov 2020:

      It depends on how you define magic. For me, science and technology are magic because we use them to make and do amazing things. We can use them to see invisible things, fly to distant places, levitate something, cure diseases, and many more incredible things.

    • Photo: Iain Tullis

      Iain Tullis answered on 9 Nov 2020:

      James Randi (who just died last month – so if you look for articles about him online there are many) spent a lot of time trying to show how the tricks were done and that there was no “magic.” He founded a magazine: Skeptical Inquirer-The Magazine for Science and Reason which is always worth a read.

Comments